Techies to help make digitised Kannada books accessible

Hyderabad-based Osmania University Digital Library has 2,133 digitised Kannada books, but they are not easy to access because their titles are not listed in the Kannada script.

Three young techies from Karnataka — Om Shivaprakash H.L., Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Devaraj K. — are now setting right this anomaly by not only transliterating the titles and names of authors and publishers into the Kannada script, but also embarking on creating 5,000 Kannada Wiki pages related to these books. The trio has created a crowd-sourcing platform called ‘Samooha Sanchaya’ (http://samooha.sanchaya.net) to get help from people to transliterate, so that the work can be completed faster.

In the next phase, the team is planning to take up a similar project with 3,335 Kannada books in the Digital Library of India, a total of 7,19,327 pages.

“We hope to enhance the reachability of digitised books and also add value to Kannada Wikipedia by contributing Wiki pages,” says Mr. Shivaprakash, who heads the team. Along with this, the team is also launching its own book site ‘Pustaka Sanchaya’ (http://pustaka.sanchaya.net) in a few days which hopes to provide exhaustive bibliographic information.

Mr. Shivaprakash says that access is a problem across languages in digitised libraries. “In all existing digitised projects, they have not taken care of the accessibility of regional language books. They should have got the book names indexed in the respective languages,” he says. “We can help people do the same exercise in other languages if they need help in making books easier to search and find.”

The same team has put together Vachana literature of the 12th Century and Dasa literature on an online platform designed to help researchers.[:]